The chemist’s worst nightmare: Runaway reactions

A thermal runaway is the chemical equivalency of a nuclear meltdown. It is scary stuff, believe me. Here is a horrible, real-life example:

Clearly, these guys had no idea of what forces they were dealing with. Going directly from 1 L to a 2500 gallon (roughly 10000 L) scale is bananas. Especially with a reaction involving dissolving sodium metal in the first step.

4 Responses to The chemist’s worst nightmare: Runaway reactions

Scary stuff! For safety reasons we are not allowed in our labs to scale up a reaction no more than three times. I can imagine how the operator thinks “Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit” when he sees the temperature rising through the roof.

I remember reading the investigation report when this happened. The dudes responsible for this disaster were completely unaware that their high-boiling solvent (I think it was diglycol di-methylether) was not so inert and would vigorously react with sodium metal once the temperature got high enough. Also this being a shoestring operation, they used old refurbished reactor with woefully minuscule rupture disk and they loaded it up as much as they could, and the water jacket water cooling was a complete joke, and there was no backup. Every time when they run “successfully” before they had no safety margin whatsoever and they had no clue.